God of Pain novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ring
At the engagement dinner Livia throws Tino Dellarocca's ring into the champagne and walks out through the kitchen; on the street the boy from her school says he is paid to bring her back.
The ring was a four-carat diamond, and Tino Dellarocca slid it onto my finger.
Forty people watched him do it.
They sat at my mother's long dining table in Milton, under the chandelier she had picked out before she died.
My father was at the head of it, smiling.
I had not seen him smile like that since my brother's funeral.
"To Livia and Tino," my father said, and lifted his glass. "To the end of the war."
Every glass in the room went up.
Tino's father, a grey old man in a grey suit, nodded at me.
I was eighteen years old.
I had turned eighteen on the ninth of September, and my father had signed my life away on the twentieth.
I had found out at four o'clock that afternoon, when a dressmaker knocked on my bedroom door with pins in her mouth.
"Smile," Tino murmured. He was still holding my hand.
His voice was soft, almost kind.
He was twenty-seven, with a tailored navy suit and the manners of a priest.
I had met him twice before tonight, and both times he had asked what I weighed.
"The wedding is on the nineteenth of December," he said, and rubbed his thumb over my knuckles. "A Saturday. You'll be a beautiful bride."
"I'm still in school," I said.
"You'll finish." He smiled. "From my house."
Somebody laughed.
Somebody always laughs when a man like that makes a joke.
I looked down the table.
My father's eyes met mine for one second, and then slid away to the wine.
That was the moment I understood nobody here was going to help me.
Not the uncles, not the aunts, not the men who had carried my brother's coffin.
So I did the only thing I had left.
I pulled my hand out of Tino's, and I took the ring off.
It came free with a little scrape over the knuckle.
The room went quiet in pieces, table by table.
"Livia," my father said.
I stood up.
I walked to the head of the table, past forty faces, and held the ring over my father's champagne flute.
"My brother would have laughed at you," I said.
My father's face went white.
I let go.
The diamond hit the bottom of his glass with a small, clean click, and champagne jumped over the rim onto his hand.
Nobody breathed.
Tino stood up very slowly, adjusting his cuffs.
"Sit down, sweetheart," he said, in the same gentle voice. "Let's not make this ugly."
"It's already ugly," I said.
I ran.
I kicked off my heels in the hallway and took the swinging door into the kitchen, past two cooks who flattened themselves against the stove.
I heard chairs crashing behind me and my father shouting my name.
The back door gave onto the garden.
I went over the stone wall in a dinner dress, with the hem tearing, and dropped into the lane on the other side.
The gravel cut my feet.
I did not care.
I ran down the lane in the dark with my heart slamming in my ears.
Headlights swung across the end of the street.
Two black cars, slow and low, coming in a pair.
I knew those cars.
They belonged to Tino's men.
I turned and ran the other way, and nearly went straight into a boy standing under the streetlight.
He was leaning against a motorcycle with his arms crossed, like he had been waiting there for an hour.
He wore a Hartwell Preparatory Academy jacket, the same one I wore every morning, with the sleeves pushed up over taped knuckles.
I knew him.
Everybody at school knew him.
He had black hair, grey eyes, and a scar through his left eyebrow that split it in two.
They called him the God of Pain, because in four years nobody had ever seen him flinch.
Cormac Reardon looked at my bare feet, then at my torn dress, then at my face.
"Evening, princess," he said.
I tried to step around him.
He moved one step, and the street was closed.
"Tino pays me to bring you back," he said.
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